Wednesday, August 21, 2013

M-We’re going to talk about Monsters today, or up until Monsters.We’ve already talked about from Monsters to Forbidden Places a few years ago, probably.So let me tell you how the story goes in my
mind.You finish Up on the Sun.You tour for
awhile.You decide you need something
out, so you do Out My Way, in
Phoenix.

D-Well, it was a year later so it was time
to do another record.

M-So you’d do a record a year and tour on
the record.

D-Pretty much.We had been touring a lot on Up on the Sun and hadn’t had as much
time.Plus, two of us moved women into
our houses.Curt had one-year olds, so
we didn’t have as much time as we’d had.On the previous records we had kind of lived together for a couple
years.Out My Way was the first record where we had really had less time
to woodshed so we decided that we’d do an EP.In the meantime the boys had bought, we had sort of stabilized in Tempe
whereas before that we were scattered.Once we had stabilized in Tempe we put together a practice space,
getting more equipment, doing proper demos, and had the ambition to do a bigger
record but we needed to get something out, so we did Out My Way which was more or less looser, longer tracks that were
more jammy, not quite as worked-out.They were plenty worked-out, but we had an ambition to do something a
little more ambitious and that wasn’t gonna be the record.We did that one in hopes that we could
reconvene with more time and more head space to actually do the record that we
wanted to do, which was Mirage.

M-Had you planned all along to do Mirage at the same studio?

D-Part of the whole planning that we
needed was to find a place.Out My Way was somewhat more tentative
because a lot of the stuff we were just getting started with.It wasn’t like we had it all planned out
like, “Ok, we’re going to find a studio in town, then we’ll do a test record,
and then if it works out we’ll do a proper record.”It was more like, “This is what we have so
let’s just do it.”It was a reasonably
spontaneous thing.We wanted to do a
record, we wanted to tour.SST wanted to
do a record.Obviously, they wanted a
follow-up to what was a successful record, so they were encouraging us to get
something out.Perhaps if we hadn’t had
that encouragement from them . . .I’m speculating cuz I can’t remember
specifically, but most likely they were encouraging us to get a record
out.So we agreed to do the EP.If we had gone to the studio and suddenly
found ourselves with an album full of material we would have put it out, but we
just didn’t.

M-When you say “encouraging,” it’s not
like London encouraged you.When SST
encouraged you was it truly encouragement or is it pressure?

D-Same difference.We’ve got a hit record out, we should follow
it up so that we can make more money.It’s not something we were resisting.It was the obvious thing.The
label can see that where their sales are.It’s their job to determine when the best time to put out something
is.They’ve got a release schedule so
they were like, “We could really use a Meat Puppets’ record now.”Also keep in mind that if you’ve got a slate
of records and you’ve got, Up on the Sun
did really well, so the distributors are like, “When’s the next Meat Puppets’
record coming out?”They want to slate
it so as to encourage their distributors to take their other records and that’s
always the case, especially back then with indies, you’re gonna balance records
that you are pushing based on records that are more-or-less presold which would
be, like, a follow-up to a hit.So they
do need a record that they don’t have to work as hard in order to balance out
the stuff that they’re trying to break, their newer records.That was around the same time Painted
Willie’s record was coming out, and a couple others that were newer bands, as
opposed to the core three or four that they started with.So there was no question that they needed product.That’s not controversial.We didn’t have a problem with that but, on
the other hand, we didn’t really have a whole record fleshed-out and ready to
give them.So we decided, “We would like
to put out a record.We want to
record.We haven’t done it in
awhile.So we’re gonna do what’s
essentially an EP.”

And we were also, at the time, exploring the
possibility of maybe getting off SST.It
wasn’t something they were necessarily helping us with.On the contrary, I understand from friends
who were around at the time that SST was getting inquiries from labels and they
were not passing them on to us.And that
was something that we were beginning to suspect.So we were going out and talking to other
labels but we weren’t getting anywhere.If I’m remembering correctly, in the spring of ’86 we were exploring the
possibility of joining Hüsker Dü and the Replacements on a major label.That may have partially delayed our focus on
getting another record out on SST.It
may not have come to anything and we needed to cut our losses and get a record
out.I definitely remember that around
that time we went and had a meeting with Gary Gersh who told us he couldn’t
sell us cuz our look was too scruffy.

M-That’s the often told story of Gene Love
Jezebel.

D-Right.That’s right around there.I’m
pretty sure that coming off of that meeting, we were like, “Let’s do another
record with SST.”At that point we
more-or-less took it to heart that we were unsellable.We were not particularly happy that some of
our counterparts were crossing-over.We
didn’t think that the Replacements or Hüsker Dü had something we did not have,
but one of the things they did have, which we didn’t have, was strong
management and people who were really working that angle for them.Whereas, instead, we only had SST and they
were actually, as it turns out, withholding information about major label
interest, for their own purposes.So,
like the extreme potheads that we were, we took the path of least resistance
and continued to work with SST for a number of years.

M-When we talked twenty-years ago you told
me that one of the things you thought might keep – and this was between Forbidden Places and Too High to Die – Meat Puppets from
really breaking through were the obscurness of Curt’s lyrics.Do you still think that?Did you think that then?

D-I suspect that what was really holding
us back was our lifestyle.There’s no
accounting for taste in the world.What
really matters is if you can do business.We didn’t do business.

M-At least not yet.

D-No.Not until we . . . By the time we got seriously involved in the major
labels everybody was over there and there was no indie network anymore.We really had no choice.

M-So you put out Out My Way, you go on tour and Curt breaks a finger.

D-Yes.

M-So y’all have to go home.He can’t play.You can’t be a band.

D-That’s right.By that time Cris had an eight-track, so he
was doing his own eight-track recording.I had my own drum kit set-up, so I was rehearsing on my own a little bit.So we had moved back to our own corners and
were continuing to work but, you know, Curt had to heal.And while he was healing he was relearning
his stuff.He had been practicing.Once his finger was building-up, he was
building his muscle strength back up, so one of the things you see, especially
on Mirage, is that more
self-conscious playing style.Whereas he
got into punk rock to really kind of mess-up and do wild things, with Mirage it’s much more, I don’t want to
say “focused,” but just more self-conscious.It’s kind of scale oriented.You
can imagine a guy, sitting on his couch with his finger healed, you know,
working on scales.You hear a lot more
of that dexterity.You can tell he’s
been practicing in a real specific kind of way.A lot of the guitar figures on Mirage
show that.They’re almost like scales.

M-And you spent a lot of time on Mirage, making the record.

D-We spent a longer amount of time, but
you have to keep in mind that before we were doing black-out weekends.Once we were in town we had the luxury of
booking time as we wanted.One of the
advantages of having done Out My Way
and getting it out of the way is that there was not as much pressure to get a
record out.We still wanted to get a
record out in approximately less than twelve-months of Out My Way.Obviously we had
hoped to get it out in the summer, but the finger break changed that.So we got pushed back.We were going to do something for the fall of
’86, instead we did something of, like, January of ’87.We took about six weeks on it.

M-And you were home, so it was a little
more comfortable.

D-We didn’t have to travel as much, we
didn’t have to block-out time.We could
just grab a day here or there when they didn’t have anybody up.Basically, once you get your basic tracks
recorded you can give the studio back its space.You can just go in and mix and plug in an amp.You don’t have to take over the entire
area.We got the basics done pretty
quick, within a week probably, maybe even less.After that you can tinker at your will.

M-So you get that record out and Curt’s
ready to tour again.You start touring
and decide you don’t really like playing the songs on Mirage live.

D-I had bought an electronic kit.They were fine enough in the studio.Once you really put them through their paces
it becomes more apparent what their limitations are.It was obvious that they were not gonna work
live.So right off the bat I went out
and bought a better set of drums.Then
we began to rehearse as a trio for a live situation and a lot of the songs were
just, like I said the Mirage record
really didn’t fit in with the way we used to do our live thing.And of course we had taken a break cuz of the
accident.Curt had been working on these
scale-based parts.Once you get back out
onto the stage he realized he really just wanted to turn it up and play power
chords.Having to play all of these
dexterous parts and do all of these difficult singing parts took away a lot
from the fun of doing it.Plus they
didn’t come off as well.

We were doing all these kinds of
things to try and get ourselves up to play this material.We were rehearsing a lot and doing aerobics
and taking performance enhancing herbs and stuff like that and doing our usual
psyching ourselves up for it, but at the end of the day it was like, “We could
just be rocking out.”As we started
playing we started including more and more covers as you do.I think during that time is when we started
to really hit that George Jones catalogue, whereas before we hadn’t.It’s just a natural progression away from
this stuff that was not as well suited to the kind of live band we were.Obviously, playing difficult parts that are
really specific was definitely not my long-suit.I only
wanted to mess around and get wild on stage.I never had any real interest in rising to the challenge of playing
dexterous parts.It was something I was
always pushed to do and I never did it well and it probably would’ve been
better if we never even bothered.But
for a lot of that period we were struggling to do something that, in my
opinion, we weren’t that good at.We had
periods where we were doing that, periods where we weren’t.But that was our first real foray into trying
to get that musical.

Hell, you look at what bands do now
and nobody would try to do that with a three-piece.You’ve got, like, sixteen members offstage
and prerecorded parts and light shows and electronics and stuff and you can put
your record out on stage just the way it sounds.We were trying to do that as a three-piece on
an extremely limited budget.We had
interesting results.But we took away
what could’ve been a lot more fun.It
was a lot more fun in the early days when we were playing punk rock.As we began to challenge ourselves we felt it
was the right way to go.Hindsight might
tell me that we would’ve been better off keeping it looser, making it more fun,
but that’s not what we did.

M-Did you ever play those drums live?

D-Once.

M-Were most of the songs that end up on Huevos already written and ready to go
when you recorded Mirage.It sounds like, the way you tell it in
interviews that I’ve read, it could of almost been a double album.

D-I’ve released all the demos that I have from
those sessions online, and you can tell which songs we were working on.Some of them just didn’t come off as
well.We were trying to get the basic
tracks done pretty quickly and when you’re doing a basic track you’re basically
looking for a good drum track cuz you can overdub everything else.The tracks that I was able to play on
electric drums in the studio, successfully, were the ones that we kept.The songs that just didn’t work-out with that
kit we didn’t use.Once we got a proper
analogue kit again, and we’d been out on the road for three or four months,
those songs started to come together, and then we had the genesis of another
record which was gonna be more live sounding.

So it’s not like all of them were
written.Maybe three that I can think of
were definitely ones that we worked on during the Mirage sessions and got short-listed.“Sexy Music” had been around for a long
time.“I Can’t Be Counted On” was kind
of a rewrite of “Baby What You Want Me to Do” or something like that.That one came together very quickly.“Paradise” and “Look at the Rain” were
new.But some of the other ones had
already been written.There were three
songs on Side B which we worked on on Mirage
and rejected.It’s just kind of a
hodge-podge.Some of them were old
songs, some of them were ones that we just did really quickly.Kind of leftovers.

M-You quite consciously, as a band, for Huevos, decided . . .you recorded it in
three or four days. . .You were gonna do it almost live.That was very conscious.

D-It was the way we had worked
successfully on Meat Puppets II, or
rather on Up on the Sun, not so much Meat Puppets II.We were like, “We know we can do a record in
three days.”It was one of those things
where Mirage wasn’t
well-received.We’d basically blown our
shot at following-up Up on the Sun by
putting out these two records which people didn’t really care for.The sales were fair to middling.We were looking to do a lot better.We weren’t
looking to stay in place.So we were
like, “Let’s try this.We had a
success.Let’s try to duplicate the
immediacy of Up on the Sun.”It wasn’t entirely conscious.It was just like, “Let’s just go in and do
this record.”

We were always dissatisfied during
this period, with everything.Always.We were dissatisfied with
our place in the industry, with our lifestyle, with each other, with our label,
with the music that was being made, with the successes of others.We were very hungry and very agitated all the
time.We were antsy.

M-You release Huevos the second half of ’87, Monsters
doesn’t come out until ’89. . .

D-Nobody was fooled by Huevos.They were all like, “These guys don’t know what they’re doing.”Some of the fans liked it, other people were
going, “This sounds like a band that has given-up even trying to put out
records that anybody wants to listen to.”It wasn’t any more successful.It
didn’t help.

M-Which isn’t completely untrue, cuz you
just said a minute ago that you had given-up trying to please anybody.

D-We were just so busy.We were getting ready to go to Europe.We got off of a summer-long tour.Then we had a week or so in town.We did this album.Then we went straight to Europe for a
month.We were making a living.So we were like, “If we put out records we
can tour.We can put out records and
tour.That will pay our bills.”By ’88 we were like, “We’re gonna really
burn-out on this.God, we have to do
this again.”We were so sick of each
other.It’s exhausting.We’re trying to be good.We don’t feel satisfied.By the time we were finished touring with Huevos, which would have been Summer of
’88, by that time we were just at each other’s throats.It was not as fun as it had been.

Of course, when we started out we
could play local shows and it was fun.Once you get out on the road it’s like, “Oh, god!This is what we’re doing.”The road is so much more grueling than
throwing your equipment into the back of your mom’s car and driving to the
local club and playing once a week.So
it was like, “This is a tough thing to rethink, cuz we have overhead.In order to do it it costs a lot of
money.The costs are going up.The only way to keep the costs down is to
really make sacrifices.It not only
makes the music bad, but it makes us hate it.”So we began to get into this kind of vise.By the end of the summer of ’88 the
Kirkwood’s were not happy.I was
definitely not happy, but that’s a given.But they were fighting with each other a lot.We were trying to drag our lives on the
road.They had their girlfriends with
them, we brought a dog with us.But Curt
had his kids at home, so he was never going to be able to integrate his life
with, like, the road thing.So it became
very difficult for him to deal with.A
lot of this is me speaking in hindsight, of course.But that’s basically the way it went down.

So it was like, “We need to get on a major
fuckin’ label.”We started making
inroads through our few contacts we had.We had a booking agent that we had worked with who was for real.This guy, he was back east and then he moved
to Los Angeles and started his own company.So we were getting a little bit better contacts on both coasts.From being out all the time we were making
contacts outside of the SST group.Meanwhile they were having their own situations in that the Black Flag
nucleus was coming apart.The original
partnerships, that thing was growing beyond its original momentum.They were trying to get bigger and yet hold
on to their principles.They had their
own booking agency.The whole thing was
just fragmenting.And then as the majors
started snapping up the artists that were paying the bills, distributors were
failing and it was becoming more and more difficult to manage this independent
network on a macro scale and it ultimately did fail.

So it was like, “Well, we did three records in
the span of, like, a year and a half, or two years, or whatever, a year and
half.”So we started, you know, the
basic goal was to get on a major.In the
meantime we had some housecleaning to do because we were trying to mend fences
with people who we’d pissed-off over the years.Obviously we’d pissed-off people by canceling a tour, cuz Curt’s finger
had broken.We pissed-off certain DJs by
being too high in the studio over the years.So there was a certain amount of needing to take a break.A need to come back and reform as something
that people could count on and get behind and not just these fuckers that
obviously came out on the road woefully unprepared.

M-I’ve always thought that you guys,
especially Curt and Cris, often, in the public eye, shot yourselves in the foot
with some of the interviews you guys used to do back then, why would anybody
want to interview you a second time?

D-That’s right.Well, you still get that now.You’ve interviewed us enough just recently to
know that we reserve the right to be prickly as necessary.

But there were some people who were
not playing our records and we needed to get them back on our side.In some cases we did.Obviously, as the thing progressed we got
professional management, and we got a major label, and the major label has
their own radio people and they would keep a closer tether on us, which we
didn’t love either, but that’s, of course, getting ahead of the story.

As far as Monsters is concerned, we did the whole record more-or-less as a
demo in the summer of ’88 using a mixture of electronic drums and live
drums.I had still felt that we needed
to incorporate modern digital drum sounds into our stuff if only because so
much of the parts that were popular and getting played were not human.It was like, “I can’t keep this kind of time
and play with this kind of precision and nobody else is either.These are machines.”So we started experimenting with
machines.We had some successful
results, so I was able to talk Curt into doing more with that.We combined electronic sounds with live
sounds and started shopping this demo around.

M-Did you do this demo in Phoenix?

D-Yea.

M-At Cris’s place, or where are you doing
these demos?

D-I guess these were done at Pantheon
again.These are
online as well.Unless the
links have died in which case you’re S.O.L.Fucking links!

M-So you guys very consciously said to
each other, “This is a make or break moment.This is the record we want to get signed with.”

D-Yea.

M-You said that to each other?That was a conscious goal of the record.

D-Well, yea.It succeeded.We sold the record.

M-But it’s gonna influence how you make
the record.Like you were saying in
going to electronic, digital, drums. . .

M-So you were consciously thinking, “Okay,
these are the kind of drums. . .”Actually, if you go to Wikipedia and type in “Linn Drum” they’ll say
anyone from Madonna to Metallica.

D-Metallica.Why am I being compared to Metallica and they
are obviously using fake drums.I’m
like, “You want me to play that!?”I hated Metallica.And yet this is the kind of style that people
were . . .this is what people seem to want to hear.I forgot about them because they are not on
my radar.That is not what I like.But nowadays they’re accepted as a member of
the same rock pantheonthat we’re in.I’m like, “Okay.”

M-So you do a bunch of demos in Phoenix.

D-About half an hour’s worth.

M-This is, when, the summer of ’88?

D-Yep.

M-And what did you do with the demos?

D-Sent them around.

M-And the result?

D-Some rejections.Some relationships were formed.Obviously the main one was formed with Peter
Koepke, who we ended-up working with.But,
again, we hadn’t had a record out since September of ’87 and it was now over a
year later and we were like, “Fuck, we gotta put out a record.”Now it was late ’89.

M-’88.

D-Yea, but by the time we had given up on
being signed it was ’89.I guess Curt
went to California and met with Greg and he was like, “We need to do a
record.”Obviously they knew we were
looking to get off.At this point we had
been stalling them for awhile.I don’t
remember any specific details, but just look at the timeline.It was over a year later.In the meantime we were kind of broke, but we
were getting back to playing every week.By that time there was about four to six clubs across Arizona that we
could play at, so we were sustaining our lifestyle through money from our
records and playing out two to three times a month.We did that for a while.You can see that on my website if you look at
the flier
gallery, you can see that we’re rotating Arizona gigs throughout that
period pretty heavily.That was
nice.It gave us a chance to work on our
material without having to be on the road.And it was more-or-less sustainable.And of course, Curt’s kids were getting a little bit older so they weren’t
requiring so much constant care.They
were, by this time, five or six.

But, you know, costs go up and, “We
gotta do something here.”Ultimately, we
were unable to get signed.So we
decided we’d do another record with SST.Curt went out, made the deal.Meanwhile Greg had gotten a Linn Drum, and he went in and with Greg’s
equipment did a demo of the song “The Void,” which is the same track the
ended-up on the record.He liked the way
that the vibe worked.It seemed to fit
the style he wanted to do.Obviously it
influenced the style he wanted to do, cuz I’d been pushing.So we ended-up doing this record with this
Linn Drum.

M-What did you use on the demos?

D-A small Roland drum machine.We had a bunch of our own cheap electronic
stuff.If you listen to the demos you
can tell that they are much more rinky-dink sounds.Obviously they were just recorded quick.You’re basically gonna get a kick-drum,
snare-drum thing, and some tom fills, and then we would either add extra
percussion or just. . .Just listen to
the demos.They take different
approaches.But the live drum sound
versus the tight attack of the electronics is worlds apart.We wanted to go with that modern electronic
sound cuz it was very, very punchy, but you do lose a certain amount of
feel.But at that point we just weren’t
really that concerned about it.

So we went into the studio in Orange
County and recorded the Monsters
record.But by that time the Kirkwoods
were just not getting along.We never
actually all got into the studio all at the same time.Curt and I would go in and he would play
scratch guitar while I worked out the drum parts, then I would go back.Then Cris would go in and do his bass parts
and then Curt did his guitar parts, and then I went in and filled-in the rest
of the missing percussion parts, and then they did the vocals.So we never got into the studio all three of
us at the same time for Monsters.

M-Never?Not once?

D-Not once.

M-What months were these?I can’t find anything on that.

D-I can’t remember.It was, like, Spring or Summer. . .I think it
was Summer of ’89.I don’t remember
exactly what the dates were.I think May,
but I could be wrong.It would’ve
actually had to have been reasonably early probably Spring of ’89 because, keep
in mind that once we got it recorded we started shopping that around.We were playing these tapes for people that
had rejected the demos and that’s when Peter Koepke came in and said, “Yea, Atlantic
will buy this.”

And we were like, “Great!Hey, guess what SST?We’re gonna put the record out on Atlantic
instead of SST!”

And then they were like, “Fuck
you.”And the whole thing ground to a
major hault.And we started strategizing
about how we were gonna fuck with those guys.

And Koepke was like, “Yea.No problem.Go fuck with them.Let us know
when you’re done.Give us a call once
you’ve got the record.Bye.”So a lot of time and energy went into this
disasterous effort which ultimately involved SST getting the record and us
having a bad relationship with them.

Then Peter Koepke left Atlantic and
said, “Yea, I still want to work with you guys but I’m going to another
label.See you in a year.”And then we just didn’t work.We went out on tour with more major label
acts opening for us. They had lots of
support.Our record was hard to
find.It was also not well received, for
obvious reasons, cuz it’s not very good.And we were not feeling particularly happy, once again, with our career.

Here’s the thing.There is nothing in the lyrics about our
desire to be on a major label on that record.All of the lyrics are pretty basic.There may be some strivings in some of the earlier records, not so much
on that one.That one seems to be more
formulaic, in my opinion.There’s more
love songs, there’s more, you know, goofy shit.Can you pick a song that would mirror the events of the band’s history
in any of those songs, specifically?

M-Maybe with “Party ‘til the World Obeys”
and “Like Being Alive” seem to be more, like, being constrained, wanting to
break-out but something’s holding you back.

D-That’s possible.“Party ‘til the World Obeys” is just a joke
song based on something that Davo once said.

M-Right.I’ve read that.But there are a
couple of really good songs on there, not just lyrically.“Attacked By Monsters” is a pretty good
song.I absolutely love “Touchdown
King,” I think it is one of your best recorded
songs.

D-It’s not bad.I just don’t like the way the record comes
off.I liked “Meltdown” when we did it
live.There’s some versions of it that
we recorded live in the studio on the radio that we released on our compilation
record. . .

Eh!Just so hard to. . .It’s so hard, at least for me. . .We weren’t really playing
together, and it’s hard to get all that bullshit out of your head so you can
just play and just focus on the music.It’s the same thing with writing.Sometimes you gotta force yourself to write ten minutes.You keep saying to yourself, “You know, if I
just could do this, then I could really work.”This was one of those periods where it’s just very, very hard to get
clear.

M-Were you commuting from Phoenix to L.A.
to record it?

D-Yes.It was over a series of several sessions and we drove.It was not one session, it was, like four or
five or six.

M-Y’all drove out there together?

D-No.

M-If you needed to do some drums you’d go
out there?

D-Yea.I usually went with Curt.I did
not work with Cris.Maybe I was in the
studio with him once.He was spending
most of his time with his girlfriend and future wife.

M-There’s an interview somewhere with Cris
where he says that he and Curt did some of the drums as well.

D-That’s not true.I recognize all those parts as my own.

M-So a series of six or seven sessions. .
.

D-Including the mix-downs.

M-With a guy who goes by “E.”

D-Yep.His name was Eric.I don’t
remember his last name.His grandfather
was an actor, somebody O’Brian.I can’t
remember the guy’s name.An old Irish
actor, ‘40s guy.

M-How did you hook-up with E?Through SST?

D-Yea.

M-And the same with the studio?

D-Yep.Greg had been using them for some of his projects.

M-So you’re still on good enough terms
with Greg where you’d take his advice, at that point.

D-We didn’t have any other options.We got more-or-less kicked-out of Chaton cuz
they didn’t like our drug use.Or at
least we were sour on them because they didn’t like it.We had used Pantheon but, I think, our
regular engineer had left by that time, he wasn’t in town anymore.We didn’t much care for the other engineers
that we had worked with.They were all
the usual, you know, local rock guys that didn’t have a great amount of sensitivity
for what we were doing.If you listen to
the demos you can tell that they are not particularly sonically
satisfying.We were just not interested
in working in Phoenix anymore, plus it hadn’t gotten us anywhere.We were trying to show that we were wanting
to play the game.

M-It seems that you were caught between, I
don’t know if you still had some sort of DIY ideals, doing it yourself and
getting people to help you out at the same time.

D-We didn’t really have anybody.

M-The guy who worked with you on those
three records. ..

D-Steve Escallier.

M-He was a relatively big name for you
guys to be working with, wasn’t he?

D-Well, he had a lot of experience.He worked with. . .What’s the name of that
movie that came out last year, earlier this year, when Dave Grohl buys the
board.

M-I know what movie you’re talking about.

D-Steve worked at that studio.He worked with Keith Olsen.He had a long list of names that he’d worked
with.But he’d never really done anything
big on his own.He was just an engineer
and he had moved to Phoenix.He was
more-or-less already transitioning out of that part of his life by the time we
met him.He was continuing to transition
out as we continued.Also, in some ways
he wanted to do more and more with us and actually be more and more of our
producer and we didn’t really want that.To a certain extent the relationship had reached its course.

So, anyway, Monsters is very transitional.There’s no real plan there.We
went to Greg and said, “We’re gonna do another record.”

Greg is like, “Here’s a studio that
you can use.And here’s a guy that I’m
using.

And we’re like, “Okay.”

M-When he says this, is Greg paying for
the studio?

D-Of course.SST always bankrolled our sessions.

M-You did it over six or seven
sessions.You didn’t blackout anything.

D-Nope.It was done over the course of a month or so.

M-And you actually gave a finished product
to SST, right?

D-Yep.It was all delivered.The record
cover was done.Only after it was all
done and it was already scheduled for release did Peter Koepke come back and
have us try to take it away from them.Even though it was all done.It
was all slated.It was very much the
eleventh hour when we tried to yank it off of their thing.And as I said earlier in this conversation,
that’s not something an indie label can really do.It doesn’t really work.

M-So it’s understandable why Greg might
have been upset.

D-Absolutely.No question.They paid for it.I think part of
it was that they did owe us a certain amount of money, so we felt somewhat justified
in, technically, we were paying for it.Our attitude, of course, was, “You’re putting out all these records that
we don’t give a fuck about, we’re the ones that are selling.”We felt entitled.We were like, “If it weren’t for us and a
couple other bands, there would be no SST.Who the fuck do they think they are?”But that doesn’t mean that you can just go in and say. . .It’s entirely
understandable.The thing is that it’s
only understandable up to a point, because Atlantic offered SST a lot of
fucking money.And we felt, and we were
probably not wrong, that there was a certain level of spite involved, if not
against us then against the industry, on Greg’s part.And that was certainly the way we felt, was
that, “This could really help us out.They should do it because we want it.” We always had the understanding with them that
that was how we were going to operate.We felt entirely justified in asking them to do what we asked them to
do.We felt blindsided that they didn’t
want to do it.Especially when we felt
that we had brought what we considered at the time to be an acceptable deal to
the table and they just rejected it out of hand, at which case Curt just more
or less went ballistic.

M-And I’ve had that conversation with Curt
already, and it’s already written down quite well.

D-He wouldn’t disagree with that.He sometimes gets some of the timeline
confused or, at least, at odds with me (maybe I’m missing it), but I don’t
think he’d dispute any of that.

M-And apparently some of those other bands
had disputes with SST as well.

D-Over various and sundry reasons,
yeah.Slowly but surely SST got backed
into a corner by those of us bands that weren’t happy working with them.It’s just one of those unfortunate
situations.Just like when wars
happen.Shit gets out of hand.

M-I think Greg was the only original guy
left at SST at this point, wasn’t he?

D-It depends on where you draw the
line.Mugger was
around.I think they had kind of
separated out their booking agency, I’m not sure who was working there.But, yea, there were a lot of new faces,
definitely.

M-Okay.I think I have what I need, Derrick.

D-Sounds like a good interview.I remembered some stuff that I had not
remembered before.I enjoyed it.

M-You had an interesting comment in a
different interview somewhere.You said
you kept the preprogrammed drums a secret to see how people would react.

D-Yea.More-or-less.We didn’t put it
out there.

M-And some people said it sounded like one
of your more live albums.

D-Yes, indeed.

M-I feel the same way.Again, with . . .

D-That’s because I sucked.That was part of the reason why I wanted to
use machines, because I couldn’t hack it as a real drummer.So people were refreshed by what they
considered to be a much more energetic drum performance. It’s no wonder I would’ve kept it a secret.

M-This is when I started seeing Meat
Puppets live, the first time was in early ’89 in Tempe, and then I saw you a
couple times up in Flagstaff in ’89 or ’90.

D-I could play pretty well live.But playing in the studio was quite more
difficult.

M-But on songs like, again, “Touchdown
King,” there’s these time changes on a nickel, and that’s what you guys were
doing live.

D-But we could never get that done in the
studio.Especially with brand-new songs
that we were still learning or that we hadn’t played out in a long, long
time.Just very difficult for me to
pick-up material and compose something really special on the fly without having
the adrenaline and the repetition of the live experience.Cuz then I would have more control.I had more control in a live environment
because shit’s happening and you’re making decisions and you can live and die
by them because there’s no going back.But once you’re in the studio and things start to get second-guessed and
people are listening more closely and everybody has an opinion.I was much better live.

M-If you’re all in the studio individually
at this time, who’s in charge.

D-Curt’s always in charge.

M-But if it’s just you in the studio with
E?

D-Oh, no.Curt was always there with me.It
was still Curt’s project.The only
projects that I really had more. . .Meat
Puppets II was the last record where I really had much project management
hands-on to it.By the time we were done
with that record, the boys were comfortable enough in the studio.

M-And this is the same time that the Live in Montana things were recorded.

D-’88.Yea.

M-You could see what kind of stuff you
guys were doing live.The variety and
the beginnings of “Attacked by Monsters,” the Beach Boys version.

D-The Beach Boys version.Right.By that time we had already been touring with Huevos for a year and you could tell we were seriously at loose
ends.That’s why I like that record, cuz
it fills-in a gap.It’s that missing
year.It covers what we were doing in
1988.